Rodinsky's Room | Granta

  • Published: 14/02/2000
  • ISBN: 9781862073296
  • 129x30mm
  • 352 pages

Rodinsky’s Room

Rachel Lichtenstein, Iain Sinclair

Rodinsky’s world was that of the East European Jewry, cabbalistic speculation, an obsession with language as code and terrible loss. He touched the imagination of artist Rachel Lichtenstein, whose grandparents had left Poland in the 1930s. This text weaves together Lichtenstein’s quest for Rodinsky – which took her to Poland, to Israel and around Jewish London – with Iain Sinclair’s meditations on her journey into her own past and on the Whitechapel he has reinvented in his own writing. Rodinsky’s Room is a testament to a world that has all but vanished, a homage to a unique culture and way of life.

This is a mystery story and a detective story. It is a story of obsession and possession. It is a story about disappearing people, disappearing buildings and a disappearing way of life. Most of all, it is a story of a man who vanished, and the woman who set out to find him and, in the process, found herself

Guardian

Highly original, entertaining and instructive ... Thanks to those two mythographers, the story of David Rodinsky will remain with us

Times Literary Supplement

A wonderful story

Observer

The Author

Iain Sinclair is the author of White Chapell, Scarlet Tracings; Lights Out for the Territory; Lud Heat; Rodinsky’s Room (with Rachel Lichtenstein); and Radon Daughters, all available from Granta Books. Born in Wales, he now lives in Hackney, East London.

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